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Fresh off the European newswires, reports out of Italy are tipping motorcycle manufacturer MV Agusta as looking to offer up to 30% of the company on the stock market. If true, the move would make good on MV Agusta’s hope of going public by 2016 — noticeably quite ahead of schedule.

Additionally, reports out of Germany are also indicating that Daimler AG (owner of Mercedes-Benz), is looking for a minority stake in MV Agusta, and approached the Italian company these past few weeks about that possibility — a move not to dissimilar to the one that saw Audi AG acquire Ducati Motor Holding.

The folks in Talent, Oregon have some exciting news today, as electric motorcycle manufacturer Brammo has announced a strategic partnership with TEAM Industries, a leading drivetrain technology firm. The partnership with TEAM brings a variety of advantages to Brammo’s production and design process, and it also sees TEAM becoming an investor in the electric vehicle startup.

TEAM’s ability to develop and produce, locally in the United States, will help Brammo not only develop its future products more effectively, but also help lower the cost of its current offering. Talking to Brammo CEO Craig Bramscher, he called TEAM Industries “American manufacturing at its finest,” and highlighted TEAM’s commitment to creating jobs throughout Minnesota, and its ability to work on a wide variety of manufacturing stages

Aside from the capital infusion, which is the lifeblood of any startup company, Brammo seems to be getting a wide array of benefits by working with TEAM.

A lot of things will change in the future. Cars will drive themselves. Motorcyclists won’t wear helmets (as we know them), and your leather jacket will be grown in a vat…at least, that’s what a new company named Modern Meadow hopes. Having just received $10 million in Series A funding, the New York-based company hopes to change the way we interact with our beloved bovines.

Getting its roots from the bio-technology sector’s research into “bioprinting” organs in a petri dish, Modern Meadow is looking for consumer-level applications to this still young technology, which right now focus on creating grown-in-the-laboratory beef and leather.

Obviously the FDA has a few things to say about creating food products from bioprinting, so Modern Meadow’s first foray will be into creating real leather with stem cells.

Small affordable video cameras are changing the way motorcycle enthusiasts record their two-wheeling adventures, and one name has dominated the market: GoPro. The San Francisco Bay Area company is looking now to continue that growth; and to help achieve that goal, GoPro is searching for $100 million in capital.

According to documents filed on Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), GoPro will look for that money with an initial public offering (IPO).

Planning to be listed at GPRO on the NASDAQ exchange, GoPro disclosed $985 million in revenue last year, up 87% from 2012; while net income topped $61 million, nearly double the $32 million GoPro earned in 2012.

KTM continues to have successful quarterly sales reports, as the Austrian company has announced that its Q1 2014 sales are up 26.8% over last year’s figures. Moving a total of 32,994 KTM-branded vehicles worldwide, the Austrian brand was assisted in that figure by Bajaj, which sold 2,748 KTM 200 Duke & KTM 390 Duke motorcycles in India.

For that bump in sales, KTM reports that quarterly revenue was up 20% over Q1 2013, for a total of €196.9 million. Earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) came to a total of €14.6 million, up a whopping 254% over last year.

Bad news in the EV world, as Vectrix Motorcycles has filed for bankruptcy…again. Unlike its previous bankruptcy though, this time around Vectrix is filing under Chapter 7 of the US Code, meaning that the company will not be restructuring and keeping its business, but instead liquidating all of its assets and ceasing operation.

We had been hearing rumors as far back as October of last year that all was not well at the prominent electric vehicle company, and finally in December 2013 things came to a head, with Vectrix closing its doors on its US operations.

Red Bull are poised to make two dramatic announcements over the next two weekends, we can exclusively reveal. At next weekend’s Bahrain F1 race, the Austrian energy drink firm will announce its withdrawal from the premier four-wheeled racing series at the end of 2014.

A week later, at the Austin MotoGP round for which it is the title sponsor, Red Bull is to announce that it is to purchase Bridgepoint Capital’s remaining stake in MotoGP, and take over the running of the series.

Sources in the private finance industry with knowledge of the situation say that Bridgepoint has been looking to rid itself of its motorcycle racing business for some time. The private equity firm had acquired 71% of Dorna in 2006, at the peak of MotoGP’s popularity, reputedly for £400 million.

Since then, they have seen the value of their investment drop, and have been looking to get their money back from the deal ever since. The sale of a 39% stake in Dorna to the Canadian Pension Plan Investment board was the first step in recouping their investment.

That deal was rumored to be worth €400 million, or just over 70% of their initial outlay. Sources with knowledge of the situation say that Red Bull is to acquire the remaining 32% of Dorna for around €300 million , but with full control over the series.

Speaking to the VeneziePost (subscription required in order to read the article), Dainese Founder Lino Dainese has confirmed the news we broke last month about the Italian apparel manufacturer being in talks for investment, or possible acquisition.

According to the report, Dainese says the company came close to inking a deal with an unnamed private equity group, but terminated the talks because the parties could not come to terms with their agreement.

Polaris Industries has announced that it has bought back 3.96 million shares of the company’s stock from Fuji Heavy Industries, for the tidy sum of $497.5 million — roughly 6% of Polaris’ total market capitalization.

Paying for the stock purchase with roughly $247 million in cash, and $250 in credit, the move is a response to Polaris’ continued push to develop its own engines in-house.

For some background, Fuji Heavy Industries was the sole-engine supplier to Polaris from 1968 until 1995, at which time Polaris began developing its own power plants.

Despite that shift nearly 20 years ago, Fugi has had an integral part of Polaris’ business up until this point, and in 2013 one in four engines in the Polaris model lineup was built by Fuji Heavy Industries.

For 2014 onward though, the use of Fuji engines is expected to drop as Polaris produces more of its own units.

It has long been rumored that Brammo, Inc. CEO Craig Bramscher envisions his company heading to Wall Street for an initial public offering one day, but now we are getting our first public words from Bramscher about how he hopes that his Oregonian company can go public in the next year or so.

Quoting remarks made at the Portland Business Journal Power Breakfast, the Sustainable Business Oregon is reporting that Bramscher is targeting late-2014 to mid-2015 for an IPO, with the figure of a $150 million being banded about as a fundraising goal from the public stock offering.

Signs of life are finally coming back to the motorcycle industry, as Harley-Davidson has shown strong gains in the third fiscal quarter of 2013. Posting an increase in sales of 15.5% worldwide, Harley-Davidson grew 20.1% in the United States the last three months, due mainly to its “Project Rushmore” line of water-cooled motorcycles.

“Rider response to the 2014 motorcycles we introduced August 18 was extremely positive. In fact, initial retail sales of the new Project Rushmore motorcycles sparked the largest year-over-year new model year sales increase in two decades,” explained Harley-Davdison CEO Keith Wandell in the company’s investor communique.